from the you're-making-this-worse dept

So we already wrote about the absolutely ridiculous Sunday Times piece which claimed that Russia and China had "cracked" the encryption Snowden used on his documents (or, maybe, he gave them to them...) and thus all hell had broken loose and the UK had to remove "agents" from Moscow. Of course there were all sorts of holes in the story, which didn't make much sense. All of the "evidence" was just anonymous quotes from government officials, much of which contradicted itself. And, of course, there were the outright factual errors. When finally confronted about this, the reporter who wrote the story, Tom Harper, admitted straight up, that he was just "just publishing what we believe to be the position of the British government." When questioned about the evidence, he said that you shouldn't challenge him, but the UK government -- as if his job as a "reporter" was just to write down what they said, not actually search for the truth.

It appears that this attitude -- "we are stenographers for the government, rather than reporters seeking evidence and truth" -- comes straight from the top at the Sunday Times. Someone emailed Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens pointing out the many problems with the article, and got a short reply that says that all of these questions should be taken up with the British government, rather than the Sunday Times. Really.

Dear Mr Douglas,

I think you should address your remarks to 10 Downing St. If you think
they have lied to us then so be it.

Yours faithfully

Martin

There are... so many problems with this, but let's just address the two big ones. First, in suggesting that they ask the British Government (10 Downing St.), Ivens is flat out admitting what his reporter said earlier in the week: they were just acting as stenographers, and have no independent evidence to back up the story they wrote. That's not the role of a journalist. A journalist is supposed to be seeking out the truth. Yet, here, Ivens is basically saying that the Sunday Times has no evidence to back up its claims.

The second big problem is the "if you think they have lied to us then so be it." That, also, is an astounding statement for a journalist to take. If someone tells a journalist that you got a story wrong and your sources lied to you, the last reaction you should have is "so be it." The reaction should be "oh shit" and then revisiting the issue carefully to make sure you actually got the story right. Instead, here, the Sunday Times position is "meh, who cares." Incredible.

from the narrative-controller-gripes-about-narrative-he-can't-control dept

Stewart Baker, former NSA General Counsel and unofficial apologist for the DHS, CIA and NSA, is still trying to pin the blame for everything on everyone that isn't a member of these fine American agencies. Privacy activists are to blame for TSA groping. Civil libertarians are to blame for the 9/11 attacks. FISA minimization procedures are also to blame for the 9/11 attacks. Encryption is to blame for the Blackberry's disappearance from the cellphone market. And so on.

Now, in an interview with Wired where he supposedly dispels "cyber-security myths," it's journalists who are to blame for people's distrust of government surveillance. But, you know, not in the flattering sort of way where uncomfortable truths are told and transparency is forced on reluctant, shadowy agencies. No, it's in the bad way where journalists didn't present a "fair" picture of domestic surveillance.

He leads off by saying there's no possible way to hold a "conversation" about surveillance programs because to do so compromises security. We're supposed to just trust the government on this, apparently.

This assertion is challenged by Wired's Caleb Garling, who asks Baker whether Snowden's leaks have served any positive purpose. Baker says there's nothing to be gained because it's journalists -- not the Executive Branch and the intelligence community -- that have been secretive and dishonest.

It was a scam from the start. Greenwald, Poitras, Snowden, and Bart Gellman did exactly what people like them have been accusing the intelligence community of doing for 40 years. They used the classification to tell a partial story in the hopes of shaping the debate, and they succeeded.

They released that order saying the government is scarfing up metadata about all your calls and they withheld, for roughly two weeks,* the [documentation] which they all had which showed all the limitations on that access. Why? Because they didn’t want a debate on the limitations—they wanted to leave the impression that everybody’s phone calls are looked at by NSA and they have succeeded in leaving that impression because of their manipulation of the classified information. That’s a shame.

*OMG ALMOST TWO WHOLE WEEKS

Left unmentioned by Baker is the fact that the government could have stepped in at any time and countered this mis-impression. But it never did. It still doesn't, at least not to any significant extent. When documents are served up by news agencies with access to them, they're routinely greeted with denials, refusals to comment or cliches about "lawful authority" and "oversight." Only very belatedly has the government experimented with transparency, and even in this, there's routinely more redaction than insight.

While it's true that the debate over security vs. privacy will always be somewhat hampered by security concerns, the US government spent years hiding its expanding surveillance programs from everybody, including oversight committees and the FISA Court. It made no effort over the next decade-plus to welcome the public to the debate -- mostly because it had already held this debate in the public's absence shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Now, government apologists like Baker want to blame the press for "skewing" the perception of these agencies and their tactics. But what other view could possibly have been presented? The government -- until June of 2013 -- held (almost) all the cards. Snowden gave journalists a deck of these own and Baker wants to criticize how the press played its limited hand.

Someone who spent years keeping information out of the public's hands (and applauds further efforts to do the same) is in no position to criticize the transparency efforts of others, no matter how subjectively much it looks like activists pitching skewed narratives.

from the journalism! dept

So we've already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times' big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had "cracked" the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had "blood on his hands" even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove "agents" from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they're not called "agents" and there's no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn't know what's actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him -- more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer. Here's the key snippet:

If you can't see or hear that, it's Harper saying "we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government." This is a claim that he repeats throughout the interview, pleading ignorance to anything factual about the story. In short, his argument is that he heard these allegations through a "well placed source" within the UK government and he sought to corroborate the claim... by asking another source in the UK government who said "that's true!" and Harper ran with it.

Some more highlights. CNN's George Howell kicks it off by asking how UK officials could possibly know that the Chinese and Russians got access to the files, and Harper immediately resorts to the "hey, I just write down what they tell me!" defense:

Um... well... I don't know the answer to that, George. Um.... All we know is that... um... this is effectively the official position of the British government. Um.... we picked up on it... um... a while ago. And we've been working on it and trying to stand it up through multiple sources. And when we approached the British government late last week with our evidence, they confirmed, effectively, what you read today in the Sunday Times.

Again: government official tells them stuff, and they confirm with another government official -- and that's the story. Note that he says he showed the UK government "evidence" yet there is no evidence in the article itself. Just quotes and speculation. He goes on, trying to downplay the entire point of journalism, which should be to ferret out the truth. But, to Thomas Harper, if you question his report, you should be asking the government about it, not him. That's not his job.

It's obviously allegation at the moment, from our point of view. And it's really for the British government to defend it.

So, you publish an explosive story based on anonymous quotes and already proven falsehoods, and then you refuse to defend it, saying that it's the government's job to do so? Do you even know what a journalist is supposed to be doing, Harper?

Howell digs deeper, questioning how the UK government even knows which files Snowden took -- and questioning if the UK government has been able to decipher that as well. Harper, again, pushes it aside, saying he has no idea and they avoided such tricky questions altogether:

Again, that's not something we're clear on. So, we don't go into that level of detail in the story.

It's then that he makes the "we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government" claim. Howell then points to one of the many contradictions in the story: the idea that Russia/China hacked into the Snowden files... and the claim that they were just handed over. And again, Harper pleads ignorance. He's just the stenographer:

Again, sorry to just repeat myself, George, but we don't know, so we haven't written that in the paper. Um... you know, it could be either. It could be another scenario.

I mean, it could be that the great fairyland dragon from the 6th dimension dreamed up the Snowden documents and then gave them to Russia and China. Who the fuck knows? I'm just a reporter, man. Why would you ask me for evidence or facts? I'm just rewriting what some government guys told me!

Howell then points out that his story is just the British government's claims, and then asks about the MI6 "agents" that were supposedly moved, and again, Harper pleads ignorance:

Um.... Again, I'm afraid to disappoint you, we don't know. There was a suggestion, um, that some of them may have been under threat. Um. Er. Um. But... the um... statement from senior Downing Street sources suggests that no one has come to any harm, which is obviously a positive thing from the point of view of the West.

Huh. So now he's the spokesperson for "The West?" Fascinating.

Again, Howell, somewhat nicely, points out that Harper is doing nothing more than stenography: "So, essentially, you're reporting what the government is saying, but as far as the evidence to substantiate it, you're not able to comment or to explain that at this point." And, Harper basically agrees.

No. We... we picked up on the story a while back, from an extremely well placed source in the Home Office, um... and then... um... carried on trying to substantiate what was going on through various sources in various agencies throughout Britain. And then finally presented the um... um... story, to the government, and they effectively confirmed what you read in today's Sunday Times.

In short: one government official told them this, and they asked other government officials, who all had a personal interest in having the answer be "yes" and after enough government officials all agreed on the same talking point, good boy Tom Harper wrote it all down and presented it as fact.

A few times in the interview Harper makes the accurate and reasonable point that when you're dealing with the intelligence community, getting evidence is often quite difficult. That's absolutely true. But then there's a way of presenting that kind of story and it's not the way Harper did so. When you have a story like this, where many of the details seem highly questionable, you don't just talk to government officials, but you try to reach out to other sources who can further the story. But Harper admits that they had no interest in doing this -- they were just presenting the government's side of the story. Even that can be done in a journalistic manner, in which case the article should not present itself as presenting factual information, as it does, but the idle speculation of government officials who won't put their names or positions behind what they're saying.

Harper concludes the interview by saying that it's very difficult to say things with "certainty" when reporting on national intelligence issues -- but if that's the case, why did the Sunday Times report present its findings with exactly that kind of certainty? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to do be to highlight the questionable claims and to detail what was known and what was no actually known? But that's not how Harper and the Sunday Times did it at all. And now he's trying to pass off the blame, saying that it's the UK government who needs to defend the "journalism" that he supposedly did. Given that he's admitting he just scribbled down and republished their thoughts, perhaps that's true concerning defending the facts of the story. However, it does seem quite reasonable to ask Harper to defend what sort of journalism he's actually doing.

from the journalism! dept

Let's start with this. Soon after Daniel Ellsberg was revealed as the source behind the Pentagon Papers, White House officials started spreading rumors that Ellsberg was actually a Soviet spy and that he'd passed on important secrets to the Russians:

None of it was true, but it was part of a concerted effort by administration officials to smear Ellsberg as a "Soviet spy" and a "traitor" when all he really did was blow the whistle on things by sharing documents with reporters.

Does that sound familiar? Over the weekend, a big story supposedly broke in the UK's the Sunday Times, citing anonymous UK officials arguing that the Russians and Chinese got access to all the Snowden documents and it had created all sorts of issues, including forcing the UK to remove undercover "agents" from Russia. That story is behind a paywall, but plenty of people have made the text available if you'd like to read the whole thing.

There are all sorts of problems with the report that make it not just difficult to take seriously, but which actually raise a lot more questions about what kind of "reporting" the Sunday Times actually does. It's also worth noting that this particular story comes out just about a week or so after Jason Leopold revealed some of the details of the secret plan to discredit Snowden that was hatched in DC. Even so, the journalism here is beyond shoddy, getting key facts flat out incorrect, allowing key sources to remain anonymous for no reason, and not appearing to raise any questions about the significant holes in the story.

Snowden has made it clear for well over a year that once he gave the documents to the original journalists, he got rid of them and no longer had them -- so he wouldn't even be able to give them to anyone else, even if they wanted them. Yet, the article insists that the Russians got them, and originally included a claim that supposedly ties the documents to Snowden in Moscow:

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden’s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

During the ensuing court hearing Oliver Robbins, then deputy national security adviser in the Cabinet Office, said that the release of the information “would do serious damage to UK national security, and ultimately put lives at risk”.

Except, that middle paragraph is simply factually incorrect -- as basically any report on the original detention would have made clear. Miranda had been in Berlin with Laura Poitras, and not in Moscow with Snowden. After this rather important factual error was pointed out repeatedly... the Sunday Times simply deleted it with no retraction or correction. Down the memory hole. Well, except if you have the paper copy:

Considering that that point is sort of a key string in the narrative of putting the documents in Russia -- the fact that it is flat out false (despite the easy fact checking) should call into question the rest of the story. But there are even more problems with it the deeper you dig. Craig Murray, a former ambassador and diplomat for the UK has written the best explanation saying that the story "is a lie." He highlights five very serious problems with the story, starting with the fact that the terminology is wrong. In the article, the anonymous government official is quoted as follows:

A senior Downing Street source said: “It is the case that Russians and Chinese have information. It has meant agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information."

Except, as Murray notes, no actual government source who was familiar with these things would mistake an "agent" for an "officer."

Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

He also dismisses the "blood on his hands" money quote given in the article. That line was directed at Snowden -- though, it was almost immediately undercut within the same exact article by someone noting "there is no evidence of anyone being harmed." It's almost as if no one actually bothered to think through the propaganda message. Murray points out that the idea that any officers would be in danger is hogwash. Beyond the fact that the Russian and Chinese don't kill western spies (they just kick them out of the country), there's the simple fact that such info would never be in the documents Snowden had:

Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified.

This same point is further confirmed by Ryan Gallagher, one of the journalists who does have access to the Snowden files and says that there is no such information in them.

This was a surprise to me because I've reviewed the Snowden documents and I've never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents. Were the agents pulled out as a precautionary measure? Keeping in mind that the UK government does not actually know exactly what Snowden leaked, how do these officials know there were documents in there that implicated MI6 operatives and live operations in the first place?

Murray further notes that the Russians are already pretty sure they know who the UK's spies are (and vice versa) and even if they were revealed in the documents, which he doesn't think is true, there'd be no reason to remove anyone anyway.

The Sunday Times piece further repeats the long repudiated claim that Snowden's cache included 1.7 million documents -- a number that even the NSA now admits was bunk and based solely on the number of documents he "touched," not those Snowden actually took.

Then there's this point, raised by security professor Matthew Green: If the intelligence agencies really believed that Snowden was carrying such damaging documents on his person, why would they strand him in Moscow by pulling his passport? Another potential problem: at one point, the article implies that Snowden may have handed the documents over as part of a "deal" with the Russian or Chinese, but in another part of the article, it discusses how the Russians and Chinese cracked the encryption on the stash. So which is it? Did he hand them over, or were they encrypted?

The whole thing is such a shoddy piece of propaganda that it seems almost hilarious... and would be if actual serious news sites weren't repeating the claims, often with little question. The BBC was quick to put up a piece repeating the claims -- though it has since added a few dissenting viewpoints. Many other UK tabloids have more or less repeated the claims. The only paper that seems to be strongly pushing back is The Guardian (which published the first Snowden revelation and many later ones as well). It has been raising lots of questions about the original reporting, demanding answers from the UK government about the claims and actually willing to call out the report as "low on facts, high on assertions."

Is it possible that others have access to these documents? Sure. Of course, the world itself has seen many of them, thanks to reporters revealing them publicly (something Snowden himself never did).

Still, even back when Snowden was in Hong Kong, intelligence community defenders insisted it meant that China had the documents. And the second he was in Moscow, they insisted that Russia had them too. In this case, it honestly sounds like the naive reporters at the Sunday Times took that "speculation" and wrote an entire story about it, searching for quotes that would confirm the thesis, but not doing any actual journalistic activity. So they got their story, and it's now quite easy to poke it full of very large holes.

Of course the timing on this is even more suspect. It comes out just as a report was published in the UK that slammed some aspects of government surveillance, and it seems noteworthy that right before this, there was a sudden upsurge in ridiculous and slightly unhinged fear mongering about Snowden himself -- none of which comes with any actual evidence, only angry speculation. It's almost as if governments pushing for greater surveillance powers might mount a coordinated propaganda campaign to smear the one guy who has been exposing their bullshit.

from the there-are-journalists-the-government-likes,-and-then-there's-everyone-else dept

It looks like the government might be forced to hold another uncomfortable discussion about who is/isn't a journalist. Among the many amendments to the DOJ's appropriation bill was one from Rep. Alan Grayson, which forbids the use of DOJ funding to force journalists to turn over sources.

The description of the amendment is only one sentence long, but it's provoking a much larger discussion.

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to compel a person to testify about information or sources that the person states in a motion to quash the subpoena that he has obtained as a journalist or reporter and that he regards as confidential.

"...as a journalist or reporter…" -- What does that mean?

In the non-specifics of a short amendment, it could mean anything. In a practical sense, its definition is likely far narrower. Legislators have periodically mounted attempts at a "shield" law for journalists. Unfortunately, their efforts have either been beaten back by administrations that love prosecuting leakers or that were sabotaged by their own far-too-limited ideas of who might qualify for the elusive "journalist" designation.

“If this became law, it would provide significantly needed protection to journalists who need to be able to keep their promises to confidential sources in order to do their jobs,” he says. “The difficulty with it, however, is that it appears to provide protection for anyone who claims in motion papers to have obtained confidential information as a journalist."

Kurtzberg says if the amendment passes the Senate and becomes law anyone who claims to be a journalist could be off the hook from testifying.

This seems like a rather odd argument to be coming from someone's whose client would have definitely benefitted from some sort of journalistic shield law. It's almost as though he's of the same mindset as some of our representatives: "real" journalists write for well-known papers and draw salaries. No one outside of this narrow definition should be shielded from the government's vengeance, no matter how much journalism they actually perform. (It's an act, not a position.)

A legal rep (Barry Pollack) for an entity frequently considered to be "NOT JOURNALISM" by legislators (Wikileaks) sees this wording as implying the opposite.

“I wouldn't say it offers no real-world protection,” he says. “It offers limited and imperfect protection. It would constrain what the Department of Justice could do. Anyone has a better chance if the opponent has one arm tied behind its back. But it is the referee, not the opponent, who makes the decision.”

As he sees it, the courts could still compel testimony because there is no federal law offering explicit protections for journalists. The DOJ may not be able to spend money prosecuting journalists, but the courts would not be compelled to recognize a protection that officially doesn't exist.

“Unless the law changes, judges may continue to rule against journalists, even without the Department of Justice openly advocating for that result,” Pollack says.

And if it's not the judges, it may be the administration itself, which has never been kind to whistleblowers or journalists. The usual mouthpiece for prosecutions is the Department of Justice, so this amendment -- if it sticks -- will make for some interesting courtroom maneuvers in the future.

Grayson himself doesn't see any real issues with the amendment as worded. According to him, the fact that lying to the government is a crime will be a sufficient deterrent to potential abuse.

Grayson points to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s recent indictment for allegedly lying to the FBI when asked if non-journalists could misuse the provision.

“If you go to court and lie about anything, or lie to federal agents ... then that itself is a crime and will lead to you being in prison,” he says.

The potential for this sort of abuse isn't what worries journalists about shield laws. It's the abuse coming from the top down. Grayson's amendment means well, but his feeling that the government -- via the courts -- will interpret this open-ended "reporter or journalist" designation "reasonably and favorably" puts a bit too much faith in a system that has shown a preference for doing exactly the opposite.

from the abuse-of-power? dept

The story of Russ Faria is already fairly bizarre. Convicted of killing his wife, he was just granted a retrial after a news investigation by the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the local Fox affiliate turned up serious questions about the original prosecution and newly discovered evidence that was not presented at the original trial. But that's not what caught my attention about the story. It appears that just before the judge was going to decide whether or not there would be a new trial, the prosecutor in the case, Leah Askey, issued subpoenas to the two main journalists involved in the investigation, demanding all texts and emails between them and Askey's ex-husband.

The full story is super confusing, but it appears to involve allegations that one of the witnesses used against Faria has been accused, by some, of actually having an affair with Askey:

The appeals court also mentioned an allegation that Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney Leah Askey was having an undisclosed romance with a police officer who testified against Faria.

Askey has denied having a relationship with the married officer, and issued subpoenas for Friday’s hearing lining up witnesses who include her ex-husband, stepbrother, a handwriting expert and two news reporters. She also had listed herself as a witness, until a defense attorney suggested that she be removed from the case for doing so.

The reporters in question, Robert Patrick from the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Chris Hayes from the Fox 2 affiliate had to get their lawyers involved to try to quash the subpoenas:

Subpoenas for testimony and documents also were served on reporters Chris Hayes of Fox 2 News and Robert Patrick of the Post-Dispatch, who worked together on investigating the Faria trial and civil litigation by Betsy Faria’s daughters against Hupp.

Lawyers for both reporters filed motions, still pending, to quash the subpoenas as a violation of the First Amendment, Missouri Constitution and common law “reporter’s privilege.” The motions also say that there “is strong reason to believe” the subpoenas were issued “with the intent to stifle critics.”

You think? Isn't there a massive conflict of interest when a prosecutor who is being accused of questionable conduct in a case uses her power as a prosecutor to not just issue subpoenas over reporters' sources, but especially when some of those sources are her own ex-husband? Wouldn't standard practice be to immediately recuse yourself from the situation due to the incredibly obvious conflict of interest?

After granting the new trial, Askey apparently asked the judge if it had anything to do with the reports of her own relationship with the witness, and the judge said it was about the other evidence. The witness in question had been called to the stand and denied any such relationship.

Askey was the first to raise the romance issue in court Friday. It was settled when the investigator took the witness stand and denied any romantic relationship.

After Ohmer announced his decision to give Faria a new trial, Askey asked whether he was basing that decision solely on the Hupp material or whether he had found any evidence supporting the relationship.

“I did not. I did not touch that,” he said, saying that the only issue was Hupp.

So it appears the issue involving her ex-husband and the reporters has likely been put to rest, but still, it should raise serious questions about why no one stepped in to prevent it from happening in the first place.

from the eat-it dept

Look, I probably don't have to tell you Techdirt readers this, but I'm a strange sort of cat. I could go into all the reasons why I'm odd, but whenever I try to explain to people how non-normal I am, I usually just reveal this little bit of truth: I hate chocolate. No, I don't not-love chocolate. Nor do I dislike chocolate. I fucking hate it, nearly as much as I hate how low I appeared on this ingenious bit of sleuthing a commenter did in determining which Techdirt writers swear the most (a list which I insist is fucking bullshit, by the way). That said, everyone else loves chocolate, of course, so I'm sure they and many others were thrilled to see so many well-respected publications blaring headlines recently about how chocolate can help reduce weight. I'd show you a bunch of links to those stories put forth by supposedly well-respected journalism outlets and scientific journals that make heavy claims about peer-reviews and fact-checking, but I can't because most of those stories have been pulled. Why?

Because the whole thing was a bullshit hoax put on by a journalist to make the point that, at least when it comes to studies around diet and health, the journals and the media the reports on their papers are largely full of crap. Go read that entire thing, because it's absolutely fascinating, but I'll happily give you the truncated version. John Bohannon, who has a Ph.D in molecular biology of bacteria and is also a journalist, conspired with a German reporter, Peter Onneken, to see how badly they could fool the media to create BS headlines. They did this by turning John Bohannon into Johannes Bohannon (obviously) and creating a website for The Institute of Diet and Health, which isn't actually a thing. Then they conducted a very real study with three groups: 1 group eating a low-carb diet, 1 group eating their regular diet, and 1 group eating a low-carb diet and a 1.5oz bar of dark chocolate daily. After running background on the groups, conducting blood tests to correct for disease and eating disorders, and hiring a German doctor and statistician to perform the study, away they went. The results?

Onneken then turned to his friend Alex Droste-Haars, a financial analyst, to crunch the numbers. One beer-fueled weekend later and... jackpot! Both of the treatment groups lost about 5 pounds over the course of the study, while the control group’s average body weight fluctuated up and down around zero. But the people on the low-carb diet plus chocolate? They lost weight 10 percent faster. Not only was that difference statistically significant, but the chocolate group had better cholesterol readings and higher scores on the well-being survey.

Bam, results! Not just results, but results the media would absolutely love to sink their idiotic teeth into. The problem? Well, the method for running the entire study was bullshit.

Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.

Bohannon goes into some of the gory math, and it really is fun to read, but this is pretty easy to understand. With a small enough sample size and testing for as wide a range of results and factors as possible, you absolutely expect to find greater variance than if your study was testing for less factors or had a higher sample size. It's simple: people are different and testing less people makes those difference statistically appear to be more significant.

Anyway, the team then went to the International Archives of Medicine, which Bohannon identifies as a "fake journal" publisher. In other words, pay enough Euros and your "study" gets "published", all without the bothersome time-waster known as being peer-reviewed. Not that IAM doesn't claim to be reviewed. It certainly does make that claim, but after payment was accepted Bohannon found that their study had been accepted without change. And, keep in mind, this study is designed to be bad. So, once the study had been published, it was time for the PR machine to swing into action.

Take a look at the press release I cooked up. It has everything. In reporter lingo: a sexy lede, a clear nut graf, some punchy quotes, and a kicker. And there’s no need to even read the scientific paper because the key details are already boiled down. I took special care to keep it accurate. Rather than tricking journalists, the goal was to lure them with a completely typical press release about a research paper. (Of course, what’s missing is the number of subjects and the minuscule weight differences between the groups.) But a good press release isn’t enough. Reporters are also hungry for “art,” something pretty to show their readers. So Onneken and Löbl shot some promotional video clips and commissioned freelance artists to write an acoustic ballad and even a rap about chocolate and weight loss. (It turns out you can hire people on the internet to do nearly anything.)

Onneken wrote a German press release and reached out directly to German media outlets. The promise of an “exclusive” story is very tempting, even if it’s fake. Then he blasted the German press release out on wire service based in Austria, and the English one went out on NewsWire. There was no quality control. That was left to the reporters.

And it didn't take the reporters long to pick up this crap-on-a-stick and run with it like children after the ice cream truck. Not all of them, but some of the stories are still up. The Daily Star covered their paper, for instance, as did the Times of India, international editions of The Huffington Post, and some television news programs. Men's Health was going to go with a story in September, though that probably won't run now. Shape Magazine didn't get off so lucky, with their story appearing in the June issue, in print. And remember, this is all bullshit. None of it is real. How does something like this happen?

The answer is lazy "journalists."

When reporters contacted me at all, they asked perfunctory questions. “Why do you think chocolate accelerates weight loss? Do you have any advice for our readers?” Almost no one asked how many subjects we tested, and no one reported that number. Not a single reporter seems to have contacted an outside researcher. None are quoted. These publications, though many command large audiences, are not exactly paragons of journalistic virtue. So it’s not surprising that they would simply grab a bit of digital chum for the headline, harvest the pageviews, and move on. But even the supposedly rigorous outlets that picked the study up failed to spot the holes.

Now, there is some humor in all of this, but also danger. It's one thing to claim that chocolate leads to weight loss and have the media run wild with it, but we all know that fad diets and exciting health claims rain down on us in buckets, and I think it's safe to say that not all of them are as harmless as Bohannon's. The average person hasn't done much thinking about the validity of these studies that they read about in the media; they simply trust the media to do the fact-checking. The media, it appears, largely trusts the journals to do the reviews and fact-checking. Except some (many?) of those journals don't. The whole thing harkens back to one of the funnier moments in the Anchorman movie, when the main character makes a ludicrous claim about women's brains being smaller than men's, and then punctuates the statement with a smirk, saying, "It's science." As far as much of the media reporting goes, it might as well be "science."

Strangely, Bohannon notes that readers of the articles were apparently more skeptical than the authors.

There was one glint of hope in this tragicomedy. While the reporters just regurgitated our “findings,” many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.

“Why are calories not counted on any of the individuals?” asked a reader on a bodybuilding forum. “The domain [for the Institute of Diet and Health web site] was registered at the beginning of March, and dozens of blogs and news magazines (see Google) spread this study without knowing what or who stands behind it,” said a reader beneath the story in Focus, one of Germany’s leading online magazines. Or as one prescient reader of the 4 April story in the Daily Express put it, “Every day is April Fool’s in nutrition.”

If we've reached a time when readers are more skeptical than the reporters, that's a massive problem for journalism, but perhaps a delightful sign for the spread of skepticism and inquiry amongst the public. Either way, look with a critical eye the next time you hear about that fad diet or health food claim.

from the bad-reporting-people dept

As you probably know by now, last summer, Elon Musk announced that he was freeing up all of Tesla's patents. He pointed out that he didn't believe patents made any sense, and they especially didn't make sense in the electric vehicle space where they were clearly holding innovation back. Because some investors still couldn't comprehend this -- and assumed (for months!) that there must be some sort of catch, earlier this year Musk clarified that, yes, he really, really meant it, and Tesla's patents were totally free. No need to obtain a license. No need to pay a fee. No need to talk to or tell Tesla about it -- just go and innovate.

Earlier this week, Ford made an announcement claiming that it, too, was opening up its patents -- but the details show that this is a lot more hype and PR than substance. First, unlike Tesla, it's not all of its patents, but rather a specific portfolio of electric vehicle patents. Second, and much more importantly, it's not open. At all. You still have to license them and you still have to pay. This is just Ford announcing "Hey, we have patents, come pay us to use them." That's not opening up those patents. It's marketing the fact that you need to license them. This is the opposite of what Musk did with Tesla's patents.

To access Ford’s patents and published patent applications, interested parties can contact the company’s technology commercialization and licensing office, or work through AutoHarvest – an automaker collaborative innovation and licensing marketplace. AutoHarvest allows members to showcase capabilities and technologies, then privately connect with fellow inventors to explore technology and business development opportunities of mutual interest. The patents would be available for a fee.

And yet, nearly all of the press coverage worked exactly the way Ford intended: claiming that Ford was doing the same thing as Tesla. Here's just a sampling:

That last one is particularly hilarious. The title doesn't reference Tesla, but early in the article it does -- and again falsely claims that Ford's program is free:

If, as basic economic theory teaches, something is worth only what someone or group of people is willing to pay for it, then it seems the intellectual property associated with electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells is worthless.

Ford Motor is the latest car company to make this case. Today Ford joined Toyota Motor and Tesla Motors in making a vast range of patented electrification technologies available to its competitors. All free for serious EV developers.

Second, that's not what basic economic theory teaches at all. It's what ignorant armchair economists think it teaches. I know we have to go through this every few years, but price is not a measure of value. Price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand, and can be influenced by a number of different factors unrelated to value. The value to the buyer plays a role in determining the demand curve. Because if the price is less than the value derived, then that's when the buyer is likely to buy. But giving something away does not, in any way, mean that something is worthless.

And, again, this article misses the basic fact that Ford is not giving these away for free.

And people wonder why news publications are struggling to hold onto readers.

from the all-the-propaganda-that's-fit-to-print dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about the psychological games that surveillance state defenders play -- both on themselves and the public -- to continually ratchet up programs that show no evidence of working. In it, we pointed to a great post by the ACLU's Kade Crockford, highlighting a rare case where an FBI official was forthright about what's really going on:

If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.

Keep fear alive. Keep it alive. And, apparently, one great way to do that is to basically get the NY Times to run pure government propaganda in the form of simply repeating anonymous fearmongering from administration officials who set up a call for this exact purpose:

“What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”

First, note the anonymity, even though this isn't a leak or a reporter sniffing out a story and needing to protect sources. This is a "briefing organized by the White House" where they play stupid games in demanding anonymity for the sole purpose of avoiding accountability. Second, note the blatant fearmongering without any specifics. It's pure "keep fear alive" in action -- aided along by a stenographer at the NY Times.

Worst of all, it’s all published uncritically. There’s not a syllable challenging or questioning any of these dire warnings. No Patriot Act opponent is heard from. None of the multiple facts exposing these scare tactics as manipulative and false are referenced.

It’s just government propaganda masquerading as a news article, where anonymous officials warn the country that they will die if the Patriot Act isn’t renewed immediately, while decreeing that Congressional critics of the law will have blood on their hands due to their refusal to obey. In other words, it’s a perfect museum exhibit for how government officials in both parties and American media outlets have collaborated for 15 years to enact one radical measure after the next and destroy any chance for rational discourse about it.

Once again, two separate government review boards, as well as judges who have looked over the program and Senators who have been briefed on the full extent of the program in question, have all said that the bulk metadata collection program has not proven useful in stopping terrorist attacks. At all.

And, of course, blatant fearmongering without comparing the costs and (lack of) benefits is completely useless. Again, it could be taken to any extreme. Would putting real-time cameras hovering over every living human being 24/7 allow the government to find out who was plotting a terrorist attack? In theory, yes. But everyone would consider it a gross violation of privacy. Just because a tool might be useful doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. So, here we have a case of a "tool" that is both a clear violation of our civil liberties and one that hasn't even been found to be useful.

Yet why is the NY Times -- the so-called "paper of record" -- repeating blindly government propaganda about how important it is to keep the program alive? Keep fear alive, NY Times. Keep it alive.

from the so-that-happened dept

The NY Times has an interesting profile of "Fusion" -- the briefly high-profile project that was a combined offspring of Disney and Univision. Fusion got some attention last year for scooping up a bunch of high-profile journalists (including a few that I really like) to power its rush into the "we'll cater to the millennials!" market. The article suggests things aren't actually going that well, but that's not that interesting to me. Instead, what caught my attention was a brief aside about how Disney keeps stepping in to tell Fusion to shut up about stuff that Disney and its friends in Hollywood don't like -- such as coverage of the leaked Sony emails:

For instance, according to two senior Fusion staff members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Disney put the organization on notice that it would not take kindly to coverage that might dent its standing with consumers. The warning came after Fusion published several stories based on documents that hackers stole from Sony.

Fusion is not alone: In negotiations to create a Vice cable channel, Disney and Hearst insisted on a clause protecting the companies in the event that Vice content “embarrasses Hearst or Disney in any way,” according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Hmmm. If true, I'd hope that some of the journalists who joined Fusion would consider standing up and speaking out about that kind of bullshit corporate interference with the journalism side of things. Every time a big company owns a journalism outlet, we always hear that they promise not to interfere, but everyone knows the reality is different. But for the actual journalists, this kind of thing requires standing up and telling the corporate parents to shove off.

And it is true that Fusion was one of the leading online sources publishing stories based on the hacked Sony emails, with a wholebunch of storiesby both Kevin Roose and Kashmir Hill -- two of Fusion's high-profile hires. It doesn't appear that either have written about the Sony hacks since back in December -- even though there have been a bunch of stories that have come out of the leaks since then.

Remember when CBS stepped in and blocked CNET, a publication that it owned, from giving an award to DISH, because CBS was involved in a legal dispute with DISH? At least one CNET reporter ended up resigning over that kind of interference. If the reports about Disney interfering with Fusion's coverage of things like the Sony hack emails is true, one would hope that Fusion's high-profile journalists would do the same.